Former U.S. secretary of defense Ash Carter died Monday from a heart attack at the age of 68, his family said in a statement.
Carter was appointed by President Barack Obama and became the 25th person to hold the position, serving from February 2015 until January 2017.
Carter oversaw a tumultuous time for the Department of Defense and played a hand in winding down the American involvement in Afghanistan and advocated for dealing a “lasting defeat” against the Islamic State (ISIS). The latter issue Carter often referred to as “one of the defining issues of my time as secretary.”
During his tenure, Carter sought to implement widespread reforms across the military. Notably, Carter announced the lifting of job restrictions excluding female personnel from combat positions. He also removed the ban barring transgender people from serving in the military, though this was ultimately rolled back shortly thereafter during the Trump administration.
In a statement following Carter’s death, Obama called him “a steadfast defender of our men and women in uniform.” The current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin said: “Secretary Carter was both a defense intellectual and a skillful policymaker who tirelessly sought a more secure America in a more just world.”
Carter served across five administrations beginning with his first appointment to the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton in the early ‘90s. Like Clinton, Carter was a Rhodes Scholar earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Oxford.
Following his term as secretary, Carter left Washington D.C. for Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “Ash was the best-prepared secretary of defense in our history,” Graham Allison, a distinguished political theorist and Harvard co-worker told the New York Times upon Carter’s passing.
In a press conference Tuesday, President Biden said of Carter that he was a “man of extraordinary integrity” and was “guided by a strong, steady moral compass and a vision of using his life for public purpose.”